Thursday, October 11, 2007

Find the best online casino odds

If you have the heart and soul of a gambler, but no outlet for your aspirations, it is time to do what you have thought of but never tried. Get busy at a casino online! On the other hand, if you are a seasoned online gambling veteran and feel that you are using your hard-earned cash on the wrong games, you may need to try something else. Consider this a guide or suggestion of what games play most in your favor. With the exception of some poker games, all online casino games are fairly easy to learn and often, the ones that are the most layered and most difficult to learn are truly only games of chance, so you can play with limited knowledge. With that serving as a disclaimer, consider learning a new game to help build your bankroll into a budget while you can scrape some profit off the top after every session of play.

In regards to your best online wagering, take into account the odds that belong to the house versus the player. One group of wagers that many don’t take into account in the online gambling world is sports gambling. You can read up on a game line and really make an educated bet that could potentially win you a nice percentage payout. In regards to sports gambling, talk to your friends that are sports fanatics. You may enjoy sports yourself and watch games, but if you haven’t played the sport at a high level of play, don’t consider yourself an immediate expert. There are exceptions, yet there are those who believe that because they hear Bill Walton and Marv Albert’s NBA commentary, they have been enlightened in regards to all things basketball. Anyone who has played a sport at the college or pro level can empathize with this statement; you have to deal with friends who attempt to educate you on all things athletic on a per game basis. So find a free education, because there is a load of money to be won on athletic events!

Within the casino walls there are of course popular games that offer good player odds. These would fall into a category of a smart wager. Generally, the games pit the player against a house dealer and offer different options within play. Consider games such as craps, pai gow poker and baccarat; all games that dependent on the bet made (Pass Line in craps, for example), offer the best odds to the player. This is a smart way to spend your money. You don’t want to cut into your bankroll immediately because you were “feeling” something. Let that feeling approach you again, after you have won a nice amount and then play with a little risk while keeping your budget and bankroll intact! When you take all the casino glitz away, you want to realize that you played with your head on and without distraction of the magic if. What if this, what if that? Be in the moment, choose your games wisely and know how to play them well and you will find your wagers to be wise and hold more potential than in any other scenario!

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Money Laundering thru Online Gambling with Bots!

Well, here's some more dirty dealing in online gambling. For those of you who've heard about money laundering through brick and mortar casinos, now some clever criminals have figured out how to do their laundry while gambling online! This article appeared yesterday in the UK's The Register.

Online casinos hit by bot armies
Don't bet against money laundering robots
By Burke Hansen in San Francisco → More by this author
Published Tuesday 9th October 2007 10:15 GMT

Botnets are fulfilling law enforcement fears that online casinos could prove fertile ground for money laundering, according to a recent, little-noticed report by risk compliance firm Fortent.

Some are engaging in variations of an old casino scam, in which preprogrammed-to-lose bots transfer dirty money - obtained through stolen credit cards, illicit drug sales or whatnot - to a chosen winner. Others flood a room and conspire to defraud a legitimate player by leveraging the mathematical advantage inherent in knowing more of the cards. Another scam involves spamming a known player in the hopes of stealing password and account information, and then bleeding the account dry through the fraudulent games described above.

Fulltiltpoker.com apparently got hit by a botnet attack recently and refunded money to the defrauded customers. A USA Today tally last month estimated that $2.5 mil to $3.5 mil per year are laundered this way.

"We are definitely seeing activity by bot-herders in online casino games, which is something we hadn't seen before," Symantec security analyst Zulfikar Ramzan noted.

We've generally been skeptical of allegations that the online casino industry would make a good platform for widespread money laundering, primarily due to the ready-made trail left by the transactions. However, the use of botnets is more problematic, due to the fact that until recently botmasters had not been targeted by the FBI, and the actual computers involved belong to innocent third parties.

Money laundering can theoretically be accomplished through many types of transactions - for example, by selling phony merchandise on eBay and transferring the money without delivering anything at all. It's therefore questionable just how much more susceptible cybercasinos are than other online businesses to money laundering. Risk compliance companies like Fortent or AccuitySolutions have products to push, after all. However, the fact that the US authorities have driven much of the online gambling and payment processing activity underground raises serious concerns about just how secure some of these sites are.

Not that gamblers are a risk-averse group, of course.®

Burke Hansen, attorney at large, heads a San Francisco law office

Dirty Poker in the New York Times!

Well, for those of you who don't recall the "Peeker" hole-card reading software I wrote about in my book "Dirty Poker," read this article that recently appeared in the New York Times. Not many people wanted to believe me when I exposed this type of cheating in online poker, but as John Lennon said in his song "Imagine," "I'm not the only one..."

September 20, 2007, 9:42 am
How Not to Cheat

By Steven D. Levitt

Let’s say you discover an old lamp and rub it, and out comes a genie offering to grant you a wish. You are greedy and devious, so you wish for the ability, whenever you play online poker, to see all the cards that the other players are holding. The genie grants your wish.

What would you do next?

If you were a total idiot, you would do exactly what some cheaters on the Web site Absolute Poker appear to have done recently. Playing at the very highest stakes games, they allegedly played every hand as if they knew every card that the other players had. They folded hands at the end that no normal player would fold, and they raised with hands that were winners but would seem like losers if you didn’t know the opponents’ cards. They won money at a rate that was about 100 times faster than a good player could reasonably expect to win.

Their play was so anomalous that, within a few days, they were discovered.

What did they do next? Apparently, they played some more, now playing worse than anyone has ever played in the history of poker — in other words, trying to lose some of the money back so things didn’t look so suspicious. One hand history shows that the players called a bet at the end when their two hole cards were 2-3 and had not paired the board … there literally was no hand that they could beat!

I don’t know whether these cheating allegations are true, because all the information I am getting is third-hand. The poker players I’ve talked to all believe it to be true. Regardless, I bet these guys wish they had it to do over. If they had just been smart about it, they could have milked this gig forever, winning at reasonable rates. For the stakes they were playing, they could have gotten very rich, and their scheme would have been nearly undetectable.

(Note that I say nearly undetectable, because while that poker site probably never would have detected them, I am working with a different online poker site to develop a set of tools for catching cheaters. Even if these guys were careful, we would catch them.)

Tags: cheating, crime, gambling, poker